The Times feature
Sophie Harris meets the internet pranksters the Lonely IslandThe screaming in Manhattan’s Virgin Megastore is shrill-to-deafening. A crowd of several hundred people currently squished into a sealed-off section of the store includes gaggles of squealing girls, teenage boys in backpacks, hipsters, loners – even the odd middle-aged person. And all are holding their camera-phones aloft, trying to get a shot of the three goofy young men who’ve just walked on-stage.
The host of tonight’s Q&A session is Paul Rudd, a mainstay of the US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live, and it takes him a good five minutes to calm the crowd before he can audibly introduce the three members of the Lonely Island – the show’s biggest new stars. The objects of desire – Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer all look delighted (well, who wouldn’t?). The first thing Samberg says to the crowd? “Make some noise!” And we’re back to hysteria.
This, ladies and gents, is the face of internet stardom today. Where once the web was the domain of entertainers who couldn’t get a regular TV show or a record deal, it is now where the magic happens. At least, it is for the Lonely Island, and the millions of people all over the world who avidly watch their comedy songs on the web. The trio’s new Incredibad album is the first ever comedy album to reach number one in the i-Tunes chart; its current single, the yacht-rap send-up, I’m On A Boat, hit the number one spot, having scored 28 million views on YouTube (and counting). Of the four highest-rated clips on the US web channel Hulu, the group has the top three. The Lonely Island are bigger than most bands; and right now, bigger than most comedians.
Their rise in the past year coincides with a change in fortunes for Saturday Night Live, too. The show has long commanded legendary status on account of the comedians whose careers it launched: Bill Murray, Dana Carvey, Steve Martin, Chris Rock and Will Ferrell to name a few. But thanks to a new wave of comics such as Tiny Fey, SNL is relevant once again; it has even been suggested that the show’s sketches during the presidential race had a direct impact on the US election result (and when we say sketches, we mean, of course, Fey’s delicious impressions of Sarah Palin).
The Lonely Island, then, are SNL’s poster boys, their brand of humour mainlining into what makes today’s young(ish) audiences tick – namely, three skinny white guys applying themselves to the least appropriate musical genres possible (hardcore rap, R&B, reggae) with utter glee. So hip are the group that their songs have attracted celebrity cameos from Justin Timberlake, Natalie Portman, Norah Jones and the Strokes Julian Casablancas.
The singer, Andy Samberg has himself become an unlikely sex symbol, romantically linked to Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore and Kirsten Dunst (he is currently in a relationship with the acclaimed harpist Joanna Newsom). One blogger recently suggested Samberg's success with the ladies must be pheromones; the comment added in below the article? No, Andy Samberg is just funny as shit.
Today, flopped on a sofa in an interview room at Universal Records swanky HQ in Manhattan, the Lonely Island boys are indeed, very funny. But more than that, they're a warm, sweet bunch of people to be around the result of their having been best friends since High School.
“We were such scrawny little guys back then,” sighs Akiva Schaffer, the member who directs the group’s videos, and whose down-trodden, inner teenage nerd is probably the most still-visible in the group. “High school is when you separate the nerds from the men,” says Samberg, whose grown-up handsomeness almost seems accidental; he is still deferential to Schaffer and to Jorma Taccone, both of whom were in the year above him at school (he is 30, to their 31). “That’s certainly the age where you love comedy most in your life,” says Taccone, “maybe it just didn’t wane as much for us, as for other people.”
If anything, their shared obsession with comedy just got stronger. The wobbly skits they recorded together as teens turned into wobbly pilots for TV shows, which eventually turned into all three working as writers and performers on Saturday Night Live. An obvious step for Taccome, whose dad works in theatre, but not so much for Samberg, whose mum is a teacher. This, he says, is his dream job.
“I personally had wanted to be on SNL since I was eight years old”, he says, “and round that same age I knew I wanted to be a comedian.” Samberg's SNL was the era of Phil Hartman (the comic famed for his Clinton impersonations) and star of Wayne’s World Dana Carvey. And since that point, Samberg sought out all the back episodes of the show he could lay his hands on.
What was it that captivated him about SNL? “Just that there’s so much dedication to something ridiculous”, he says. “Around the same time, we were discovering Monty Python and Mel Brooks and the Zucker movies [Top Secret, Airplane]. So it was just the idea that people spent this much time and energy to make something that made no sense, he says, the whole reason they did it was just to make people laugh.”
That joy in the ridiculous runs through all the Lonely Island’s songs and skits. It’s there in Space Olympics, which has Samberg dressed as the silver-faced host of the sports fest in the year 3022, emoting sports clichés through a vocoder (one prime moment has an ecstatic Samberg groaning to a straight-faced Michael Phelps, You’re in the motherf***kin’ Space Olympics!).
Another thing that distinguishes the Lonely Island is that the sheer quality of their musical pastiches, which are not just spot-on, but also insanely catchy. The song, I'm on a Boat, which features the rapper T-Pain, is easily a sonic match for the beefy beats and slick R&Bisms of T-Pain's own chart-busting singles. And what mighty production force is behind the arrangements and production? Why, the Lonely Island boys themselves. The songs are born of their genuine love for hip-hop and R&B. “Growing up in Berkley California, that was what we all listened to”, says Schaffer. “We're not making fun of that music, we’re more using it as a medium to tell jokes.”
And why does rap lend itself so well to comedy? “Well for one thing, there’s a lot of room for words”, says Samberg, “you can really do some writing. And hip hop, from the very beginning, has always had a comedy element”. Schaffer concurs. “It’s always been about the witty rhyme”, he says, “like, battle rapping is about how cleverly you can put somebody down.”
Far and away the groups most glorious rap moment so far is the celebrated Lazy Sunday skit, which was viewed 5 million times on YouTube in its first month’s airing. In it, Samberg and SNL pal Chris Parnell recount a lazy day spent buying cupcakes and going to the cinema to watch The Chronicles of Narnia, in a shouty, thug-rap style. “Making it only cost us twenty dollars”, shrugs Taccone, “and that was in cakes.”
Then of course, there’s Natalie’s Rap, the full-on aggro hell-rap written by the trio for the delicate, elfin Natalie Portman, who swaggers, kicks and punches her way through the video. “What do you want?” shout the guys; “To drink and fight!” yells Portman, clearly having the time of her life.
But if you needed to explain to someone who the Lonely Island are in a hurry, chances are that four words will suffice: Dick In A Box. This is the song the group recorded with pop prince Justin Timberlake, a couple of Christmases ago; it won them an Emmy Award, and to this day has people weeping with laughter into their computer screens. A pitch-perfect parody of the cheesy R&B videos that dominated the charts in the 1990s, the skit casts Timberlake and Samberg as ratty Romeos, promising to give their ladies the ultimate gift: “It’s my dick in a box, girl…” Timberlake croons, with an actual gift box glued to his trousers.
Part of what’s funny is that the video is not wholly dissimilar to Timberlake’s own, Loverman-style videos; and of course, the more ridiculous the posturing in pop music videos becomes, the greater the need to spoof it.
Like so many of pop’s greatest hits, Dick In A Box was written more or less in minutes-flat: Timberlake was due to host an episode of SNL and as a fan of the group’s Lazy Sunday sketch, he suggested they sing together. After deciding on the musical genre, the group scribbled down the lyrics and rushed downstairs with the song on a piece of paper. “And as soon as we showed him,” says Taccome, “he was like, Yesssss!”
Timberlake, who is now himself an SNL staple (recently guesting in a spoof of Beyonce's Put A Ring On It video dressed in a leotard) is a comedy natural, and yet another example of the boundaries between music and comedy becoming increasingly blurred. Another US success story is the TV show Flight of the Conchords, which went from cult favourite to mainstream hit in under a year; and back in Britain, we have the less glamorous but utterly hilarious comedy duo Adam & Joe, who recently released their own ‘Song Wars’ album.
Asked if they think musical comedy is now a bigger deal now than ever, the group feels that it’s more a matter of visibility. And one only has to look at Bill Bailey, back to the likes of the Goons and Jake Thackery to see its long lineage. “We are like the children of Spinal Tap and honestly, Weird Al", says Samberg, referring to the 1980s master of the comic song, Weird Al Yankovich, who had 1980s school kids singing along to such ludicrous pop hits as the Michael Jackson pastiche, Eat It.
“If musical comedy *is more popular”, says Schaffer, “my guess is that its because the internet is such a good place to see a two-minute, funny little musical video. Before the internet, your only option was to stay glued to MTV, or borrow a clunky VHS tape. And it’s certainly more motivation to make something”, says Schaffer, “if you know someone’s gonna see it.”
Hence the slew of Lonely Island copycat videos now to be found on YouTube. Take Jizz In My Pants, for example, a song that started out as a slick, faux-saucy eurobeat song and has since been reworked by a group of Chinese physics nerds, by emo kids in their bedrooms, and a young classical pianist, with Schroeder-like seriousness. “It's been really cool to see just how creative everyone seems to be in the world”, says Taccome, with real delight.
So what's next for the Lonely Island? “Gosh”, says Samberg, flummoxed. “To be totally honest, we're doing it. We’re doing everything we wanted to do. We made a movie [Hot Rod], we made an album together, we're working on SNL Just more friendship”, deadpans Taccome, “I’d like a lot more friendship out of you guys in the future”. Samberg grins, “I think if the young us could look at the now-us, Id be like, [in a serious voice] Yeah! Thats it!”
